Oh, come on. Did everyone have one of those around here?
Remmy threw up her hands. “Wait! Wait! It’s me, Remmy Fawkes! Just wait a second, okay? I can fix this!”
The automaton in the pneumo room must still be sending out signals, because an automaton pushed its way to the front to say, “Remington Fawkes, you are―I am being told you’re not.”
Nobody paid the waffling machine any attention. We all watched Remmy take a couple of steps towards the militia soldiers, her hands still raised. She turned slowly, in full view, and held out her arms. “Give me the cat for a minute.” She kept her voice nice and loud. Nobody would think she was whispering escape plans.
I had no choice but to play along. I unwrapped Archimedes’ tail from my neck, which stung like pulling off a really sticky bandaid. Slowly, letting everyone see what we were doing, I passed him to Remmy.
She looped his tail around her own neck, and as his eyes reopened and he looked around, she pointed my own fluffy black cat weapon at me and commanded, “GO AWAY AND NEVER COME BACK!”
I didn’t feel the slightest compulsion to obey, but the air screamed and wind whipped around us violently. The gale ended as abruptly as it began, and I looked around to see the Red Herring already turning into a dot in the distance.
Whirling back around to face Remmy, I shouted, “What was that?!”
She returned my glare, fury for fury, for nearly a full second. Opening her mouth to retort, she instead hunched forward, retching. Her hands clawed at her own neck, prying Archimedes’ tail away. She pushed him out of her arms, and as I dove to catch him, Remmy collapsed to her knees, dry heaving.
The militia leader stepped forward, followed by a small squad. They kept their weapons pointed straight at us. “Okay, kids. This has been a strange day. We’ll lock you in your bedrooms, and as soon as we’re sure everything is safe, the automatons will decide what to do with you.”
I did not want to hurt these people. I did not want to be shot. I had my hands full of a deactivated Vera and a curled up Archimedes. This was definitely a job for Claire.
Instead, something clanked behind me, something, hissed, and drops of flaming white blazed as they hit militia members. A few of their weapons exploded, the shrapnel scattering blood around the upper steps.
High pitched screams of terror and lower screams of fear roared out of the crowd as it tried to stampede back down the stairway. Remmy pushed herself up to her feet, and grabbed a fistful of my jumpsuit. She glared, eyes bloodshot and full of hate. “What are you doing? What are you doing? Stop it!”
I shook my head as fast as I could. “I’m not doing it! I swear!”
Remmy shook me weakly. She was too nauseous to shout, so she rasped and gurgled instead. “I should have known. Only a murdering monster can control Puppeteers.”
“I’m not doing this!” I repeated, my own voice squeaky and shivering. I pushed Vera into a pocket, and with a shaking hand pushed Archimedes’ tail down the back of my jumpsuit. Holding him in both arms, I directed him at the security automaton’s booth and commanded, “Cease fire!”
I was now facing the defense mecha. They obeyed, freezing where they stood. That didn’t even last long enough for me to feel relief. They lurched back into motion, turning to spit more little white balls of flaming death. Screams behind me attested to their aim.
Remmy’s hand hung on my shoulder. No longer accusing, now she begged. “You’re killing people! Stop it, please!”
“It’s not me!” I didn’t have time to argue with her. I yelled, “Stop! Cease fire! Don’t shoot! Deactivate!” and Archimedes yowled my desperation. My efforts threw the rampaging mecha into stop motion, lurching back and forth as they obeyed, then started firing again, then froze, then turned to open up on new targets.
Something moved, out beyond the air bubble. I almost thought it was the Red Herring coming back.
Instead, it was something much weirder. A man in a flight suit dropped out of space, landing in a crouch behind the mecha. “Remington Fawkes, you’re coming with me!” he announced in a deep, confident voice.
Then he ran up and hit the first mecha. He didn’t crush it, but he didn’t hurt his hand, either. The blow knocked the walker on its back, leaving him free to charge the second, sending it sprawling with one punch.
“Who’s that?” Claire sounded completely lost.
“My other brother,” wheezed Remmy.
There were four other mecha, but Remmy’s brother had cleared a path, and that seemed to be enough. He crossed the distance to us in a sprint, vaulted over our shield, and scooped Ray and Remmy up in one arm, and me and Claire in the other.
“My aetheric fluid!” Remmy squeaked, but Ray had already realized we were leaving. He could only grab two tanks out of four, but he snatched them up and held them while our superpowered savior made a break for it.
“Close your eyes and hold your breath!” he commanded as he ran for the edge of the space station.
There was nothing out there. He was carrying us right into space.
All I could do was take a breath, close my eyes, and try not to think.
We hit something, and went through. Air rushed around us, to be replaced by cold.
Freezing, agonizing cold. My ears hurt. My lungs hurt. Was I going to explode? I’d read all sorts of horrible things about what happened to you in open space.
Cold would kill me first. It seeped through my insulated jumpsuit, numbing my hands, clawing its way up shivering arms and legs.
Air rushed all around me, and I fell, cold but not deadly cold, onto metal.
I opened blurry eyes. Ray and Claire lay next to me. Our rescuer, who’d just flown us through space with no jetpack or spacesuit, leaped up a ladder and into a brightly lit room, carrying Remmy with him.
My ears hurt. They rang horribly. I hoped they weren’t bleeding. I could still hear him say, “Remington, you’re a good pilot. Get us out of here, and make for Io―on the double.”
huddled in a ball, sick and disoriented. Ugh. What had exposure to vacuum done to me? Would I recover? This horrible dizziness felt like… zero gravity. Duh.
Flexing numb fingers, I reached out a hand to Ray. My hand met his, already reaching. We wrapped our fingers together and squeezed, although between the gloves and the lingering chill I couldn’t feel much. It was still nice.
I reached my other hand out to Claire. She still had her eyes tightly shut, breathing slowly. I touched her shoulder, and her eyes peeked open. She stretched her back, extending one arm and yawning like a cat, while her goofy ponytail flapped around the back of her head like a golden brush.
Was I seeing the real Claire? It didn’t matter. She gave my hand a squeeze, and we all let go and started looking around.
From the interior of the ship, Remmy’s voice rang. “I’m not going. There are people dying back there!”
This brother had a deeper voice than Calvin. Smooth, but a little too forceful to be charming. “You are going, and nobody’s dead. I didn’t see any bodies.”
No bodies. I searched my memory. I’d seen blood, but no one motionless. I looked at Ray and Claire. They both shook their heads. I shook mine. As if I needed to feel any dizzier in zero-G, the relief sent a wave of faintness over me.
Remmy had gone quiet the same way I had, and sprang her next question just as I started paying attention again. “They still need our help. They need your help, Thompson!”
I couldn’t tell where in the ship Remmy and Thompson were. With the metal walls, and in our little ladder-lined tube, voices seemed to bounce around from everywhere. Thompson’s answer came in the classic ‘frustrated with a foolish child’ scolding tone. “Do you think everyone but you is stupid, Remington? There’s a hundred mechanics on that colony. They’ve already cut the security bot’s communications and power lines. If that doesn’t work, they’ll seal some bulkheads and grease the floor until the walkers fall down, then get around to the deck from a side hatch.”
Anot
her pause, while we all digested that. Weight came back. Me, Ray, and Claire settled down against one wall of the entrance tube that was now a floor. In seconds, I felt downright normal.
Grabbing hold of ladder rungs to pull myself up, I took a cautious step into the next room and called out, “People were hurt. Set on fire. Cut up. If they’re not dead yet, they will be.”
The room looked both familiar and weird. I’d seen it in Calvin’s spaceship, but rearranged. The entrance hatch and bottom of flying saucer had been ‘down’ then. Now it was one side. The door on the other end must have led into the cockpit, but Thompson filled the door and then some.
Gravity wobbled. Thompson grunted in frustration that we still didn’t get it. “Kids, if there’s one thing the automatons are good for, it’s doctors. Nobody’s dead. You know how I know? Because they stole our n-ray projector.”
That didn’t mean anything to me, but my weight stabilized and Remmy continued to say nothing. It must have been an answer for her.
Nobody was dead. Nobody was going to die. That was the important thing. Oh, thank Tesla.
Claire had already recovered enough to coast across the room on her skate-enabled shoes, only to sit herself on a trunk strapped to the wall next to Thompson. She gave him a wan smile, folding her hands on her knee. “You certainly saved us, so thanks for that. We’re the Inscrutable Machine, from Earth. I’m called E-Claire, and that’s Bad Penny and Reviled.”
He nodded, his irritation melting in the face of Claire’s friendly gratitude. “Yeah, I know. My little brother sent me a message on that crazy super radio Remington built. He didn’t ask me to show up, but rescuing people seems to be my job. They call me Chief Fawkes.”
Huh. Had we stumbled on the local superhero?
Claire flashed him her coy grin. “Do they really call you that, or is this another Fabulous Mr. Fawkes thing?”
“They call me that because I hit them if they don’t.” No smile. Yikes.
I would have drowned in the awkward moment. Claire leaned back on the box and smiled as if he’d made the friendliest joke in the world. “Then thanks for the rescue, Chief Fawkes. Would that make you leader of the Jets we’ve heard so much about?”
“Some of those Jets are back there on Callisto getting shot at,” Remmy’s voice cut in from the room beyond Chief Fawkes. Yes, that had to be the cockpit.
“They decided to become Rotors. They’re not my problem anymore.” An angry sneer flashed across Chief Fawkes’ face. That cold voice held no trace of joke. He meant it.
I erased the mental checkmark next to ‘local superhero.’
Again, Claire smoothed over the awkward moment by pretending it wasn’t there. She leaned forward again, and I knew she wasn’t faking this eagerness. We were getting to her favorite topic. “How did you get us here without a spacesuit?” For her, this was delicate and roundabout.
Fortunately, everyone loves to brag. Chief Fawkes’s grin came right back as he looked down at the admiring starry-eyed teenager. “Superpowers run in the family. I got three kids worth of the physical stuff. Remington got three kids worth of the mental stuff. Calvin got three kids worth of meddling.” He leaned through the door. From here, I couldn’t see him messing with Remmy’s hair, but her annoyed squeal was diagnostic.
“So you can breathe in space? How do you maneuver? I saw you hit those robots, so I know you’ve got super strength. If you have that many powers, I bet you have more, right?” Claire’s eyes gleamed with the feral hunger of a geek in her element. Ray had wandered up the room about halfway, holding onto a cabinet handle and listening.
I was interested, but not as obsessively as my best friends. My eyes were on his flying saucer. Calvin’s ship had a lot of clutter. Thompson’s was clean, with everything either strapped to or bolted into the walls. Those were metal. A ladder next to a small elevator accommodated the fact that most of the ship was up or down, and the chairs against the walls were padded with multicolored scaly leather. The place looked businesslike, more like a modern spacecraft built by people who couldn’t depend on flashes of super-technology.
Thompson ‘Chief’ Fawkes looked a lot like his brother, but bigger and blockier. Like Calvin and Remmy, he had hair somewhere in the ‘dirty blond’ range, although he kept his almost buzz-cut short. The stiff, shiny leather flight suit did not hide how muscular he was. He kind of reminded me of the dockhands at the port, but with a more squared-off jawline and a terrible need to shave. I wanted so bad to write him off as a meathead, but he’d come up with a way to deal with those rogue mecha in seconds. Just because he was big didn’t make him stupid.
It didn’t make him mean, either. He shut the door to the cockpit, and walked along the wall, pulling open hatches to reveal bunk beds and plush leather chairs. “It’s more like I can hold my breath forever. You kids aren’t Fawkes, so you must feel like freeze-dried jerky right about now. Take a rest, and you’ll be okay by the time we get to Io.”
I took a chair. It had firm cushions, but so thick, I felt like I sank into them anyway. Claire flounced into the chair next to me, and Ray hopped up into a bunk bed above us, laying himself flat and peering over the edge. Looking up at his slyly amused face made me notice the buckles hanging from the edge of the bed. The chairs had seatbelts as well. Absolutely everything could be strapped down in this ship!
Claire refused to be swayed from her greatest love, blasting Chief Fawkes with her ‘eager and curious’ smile. “So, you’re semi-oxygen independent. Sounds like good internal recycling. You must eat several times what non-powered people do. And you can fly, right? Nobody just leaps out into space and hopes they’re pointed in the right direction.” She leaned way forward in her seat, hands clutching the edge and her huge glasses magnifying her eyes.
“Good enough for space. Don’t ask me to show you while we’re under thrust.” A moment’s pause, and he added in a completely failed attempt at casual, “You should see Remington try to fly.”
Sheesh, Remmy had two bad cases of big brother. The door to the cockpit opened long enough for her to shoot a glare at him through it. “You may float like a butterfly, but your rust heap spaceship leaks air.”
Thompson and Remmy gave each other hard looks for a couple of seconds. He broke the staring match to walk over to the entrance tunnel on the far wall, haul back his fist, and punch the hatch just out of sight. The clang of bent metal exploded through the ship, making me wince. My ears were already sore from the trip through vacuum.
Remmy’s face disappeared. Three seconds later she yelled, “Yeah, that fixed it,” and slammed the cockpit door closed.
We all stayed very quiet as Chief Fawkes climbed the ladder to the flying saucer’s next level, and before any of us figured out what we would do without him, he climbed right back down. He returned with a bundle under one arm, and as soon as his boots hit the floor, he tossed packages at us. We all fielded our light paper-wrapped package, although I fumbled a bit. When he tossed drink bottles straight at our heads―well, Ray’s hand darted out and grabbed all three, one after the other, and handed down mine and Claire’s delicately.
He still had a fourth packet and bottle, and after telling us, “Eat. You’ll be starving after all that action,” he pulled open the cockpit door and stepped inside. I got a brief impression of a room composed entirely of dials and switches before he closed the door behind him.
Wrinkling my nose suspiciously, I unwrapped this supposed food. So far, I had not enjoyed a high opinion of Jupiterian cooking. My skepticism was not immediately dispelled by the block of barely flexible, rainbow-tinted, mostly white stuff. “What is this? Hardened blubber? Edible plastic?”
Ray stuck the ragged block in his mouth, ripped off a chunk, gave it a few chews, and swallowed. “Fish jerky.”
I lifted the block and sniffed. It did smell fishy, with a hint of petroleum, like the blobs of fish they served in the Rotor dorms. It was also so salty, my nose stung just smelling it.
Eh. I was hungry. I took a
bite, although that involved a certain amount of yanking and struggling to rip off a piece that Ray had not had to deal with.
Actually, it mostly tasted like salt. However they dried this stuff for storage, it greatly reduced the chemical flavor. Jovian Fish Jerky might not be a taste sensation, but it was edible.
The bottle contained water with a citrus tang. Ah, scurvy prevention.
About the time I’d succeeded in chewing my second bite into submission, I noticed that my chair felt awfully warm, much warmer than my skinny butt could possibly have explained. For that matter, so did the top of my head. I looked up to see coils built into the underside of Ray’s bed show just the faintest hints of red. Built in heaters were a nice touch, which I appreciated after being dragged through the icy void of space.
I sank into the chair, gnawing my meal and wondering if I could invent super jaws. The block of meat was way too big for me, even as hungry as I was, so eventually I used the Machine’s jaws to cut it in half, and passed the rest up to Ray. He ate the stuff like it was soufflé.
We all lingered over the meal, relaxing in our thickly cushioned seats and bed. Remington and Chief Fawkes said things I couldn’t make out through the closed cockpit door, then Remmy’s Extra Big Brother came out, and climbed up towards the top of the ship. Faint whistles and squeaks that echoed down sounded like radio noise.
I was considering my last couple of bites of alien fish jerky when gravity shut off. I clutched at the straps of the seat. My water bottle drifted off to the side, then fell out of the air as gravity turned right back on. Lunging forward, I actually managed to grab it in both hands before it hit the floor. Go, Penny! +1 coordination!
A soft noise made me look up. Ray was leaning over the edge of the bed again, chuckling.
“What?” I asked him accusingly.
Ray required no explanation to know how upset I was―i.e. not at all. He curled his head down farther, caught his hat when it tried to fall off, and explained, “Merely enjoying the contradiction in tech levels. The alien race with no technology at all has living fish that ignore inertia and fly without propulsion. The pre-electrical culture relies on pneumatic tubes and tapping on metal rails for communication, but they have atmosphere bubbles and artificial gravity. The only folks with motors and radios have to rely on acceleration to mimic gravity. While technically a higher level of technology, this ship looks crude in comparison with Calvin’s, and barbaric compared to the Rotor stations.”
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